A local automaton for the 2D toric code

Understand

We construct a local decoder for the 2D toric code using ideas from the hierarchical classical cellular automata of Tsirelson and G\'acs.

• Our decoder is a circuit of strictly local quantum operations preserving a logical state for exponential time in the presence of circuit-level noise without the need for non-local classical computation or communication.
• Our construction is not translation invariant in spacetime, but can be made time-translation invariant in 3D with stacks of 2D toric codes.
• This solves the open problem of constructing a local topological quantum memory below four dimensions.